PBS doc shines light on shameful period in American history

The hideous chapter in American history had passed, and the slaves were freed -- or so everyone thinks.

PBS' gripping documentary"Slavery by Another Name," airing Monday, Feb. 13 (check local listings), chronicles how slavery continued in the South well into the 20th century while the rest of the country ignored it. Laurence Fishburne narrates."What I really want people to take away is you can't partition parts of our history," says Dr. Sharon Malone, who is featured in the film. "There is not Southern history; it is American history."

Malone, an obstetrician, is a sixth-generation Alabaman married to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Her older sister, Vivian Malone, helped integrate the University of Alabama in 1963, protected by the Justice Department, which Sharon's husband now runs. Malone's uncle, Henry Malone, was arrested and served a year and a day in Alabama's Monroe County under the peonage system. Precisely what, if anything, he had done is not known.

The peonage system was how slavery continued.

Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Slavery by Another Name," upon which the 90-minute film is based, details the peonage system. Though most people believe the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, blacks were re-enslaved to work, without pay, in coal mines, cotton fields and brickyards. They were shackled, beaten, bought and sold.

They were slaves.

And this was all done under the thinnest veil of legality. Though the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, there was a loophole: except in the case of punishment for a crime.

And crimes for blacks included talking loudly in the presence of a white woman, leaving one job for another, selling cotton after dark and walking along railroad tracks.

Even the film's director and producer, Sam Pollard, whose first assignment as a documentarian was "Eyes on the Prize II," was not steeped in this period.

"Most of us -- black and white -- think of Reconstruction as a period of black empowerment," Pollard says. "The whites were saying, You are not really free. How can we control them? How can we get cheap labor to work in the mines?' It becomes systematic oppression."

The documentary does a magnificent job of showing the nameless men and women forced to work in mines, drink foul water and endure face lashings and abuse. The film uses photos, actors and interviews with descendants to tell the story.

It also features a moving interview with Susan Tuggle Burnore, whose great-grandfather John S. Williams owned a plantation worked by slave labor that was sanctioned under the peonage system.

Even after federal agents inspected his plantation and saw the shackles in the slave quarters, they gave Williams a pass because he had paid for the men's bonds and gotten them out of jail, and they now were supposedly working off their debt. This was not out of the ordinary in that place and time. But Williams, fearing his world would change, decided to destroy the evidence and murder the 11 men working for him. In so doing, in 1921 he became the only white man convicted of killing a black man in Georgia since 1877. He died in prison in 1966.

"I always knew my grandfather died in prison," Burnore says at a Pasadena, Calif., press conference. "My family told a story that was, forgive the pun, whitewashed -- that he had, along with a lot of other men in Jasper County, Georgia, killed some escaping prisoners. These were supposedly hardened convicts who had done terrible things and were being worked on the plantation."

What was terrible was how the men lived and died. Some were thrown alive, tied to farm machinery, off a bridge.

The film is filled with such stories. Though this is not an easy topic to read about or watch, it is an important one. The documentary was just shown at Sundance.

"Vestiges remain, the industrial prison complex," Pollard says. "Even when you go to the South today, you go down to Alabama and Mississippi," it's apparent. And it's not just buildings where attitudes and the former law of the land linger.

Pollard recalls visiting an aunt in Mississippi in the summer of 1975, who still went the back way into stores.

"She was so used to it," he says. "No black person would come through the middle of the street. It is not to say that life has not changed in the South, but there are still remnants."

Though PBS documentaries about history don't generate the sort of attention that antics on a reality show does, Pollard considers how to entice people to watch.

"You've got to say to people you will see the drama of how American history unfolds," Pollard says.

"You have got to know from whence you came to know where you are going," Malone says in a separate interview. "It makes the progress of the African-Americans all the more remarkable."